ROBERT DEWITT: Feds poorly managed Social Security

Wednesday

Oct 16, 2013 at 12:01 AM

My father would be 104 years old today, if he were still alive. I can remember on Dec. 6, 1976, when my father paused a moment and noted that it would be his father’s 100th birthday. It never occurred to me that I’d do the same one day.

By Robert DeWittSenior Writer | The Tuscaloosa News

My father would be 104 years old today, if he were still alive. I can remember on Dec. 6, 1976, when my father paused a moment and noted that it would be his father’s 100th birthday. It never occurred to me that I’d do the same one day.They had a lot in common. My grandfather was in his 50s when the Great Depression hit. He had been in the sawmill business all of his life and, with its heavy dependence on construction, there wasn’t a lot of activity in the industry during an economic depression. Lots of men younger than him were unemployed, too. Who needs a 55-year-old sawmill manager when you can hire a 35-year-old man?The closest my grandfather got to retiring was being unemployed while my father supported their family, living on $5 a week and sending back home the remaining $25 of his paycheck from working on a Florida Road Department survey crew. Back in those days, your children really were your retirement plan.Pappy, as my grandfather was known to his grandchildren, got steady employment as World War II revived the economy. One day in 1946, he was smoking a cigarette after breakfast before going to work when he dropped dead of a heart attack. I don’t know how much he paid into Social Security, but he never collected a dime of it.My father faced a similar predicament after his business failed when he was 62 years old. He had jobs as an exterminator, a building inspector and a building supply store clerk before retiring at age 66. It seemed at the time that it was more like unemployment and less like retirement, but since he could collect Social Security, we could call it retirement.Unlike my grandfather, my father probably collected more Social Security than he paid in. He was 62 when he began collecting Social Security and died when he was 84. He was fortunate to have it, since the business that was pretty much his retirement plan left him with nothing.I won’t be eligible to collect Social Security for another eight years. People my age live with the fear that they have been paying into a system for years that will have nothing for them when it’s time to retire.Retirement has been compared to a stool, with Social Security, private savings and a company pension making up the three legs. I’ve already had one of the three legs sawed out from under me. The New York Times Company, which owned this newspaper before selling to the current owner a little less than two years ago, froze our company pension five or six years ago. I’ve since converted it to an individual retirement account.I’ve never been a big risk-taker, so my 401K has never grown like some have. It’s possible that economic upheaval could make the whole thing turn into a puff of smoke like gunpowder when a match touches it. It’s kind of hard to live off wispy vapors.That leaves Social Security. It’s been popular lately to call Social Security and Medicare entitlement programs, like food stamps or Medicaid. Some people try to shame hard-working citizens who resent giveaway programs, calling them hypocrites when they use any kind of government service.It’s quite true that most everyone wants to cut any government program except those they derive benefit from. But Social Security isn’t an entitlement program. It’s a retirement fund that people have paid into for years on the promise that they could draw benefits from it at retirement age. And now, the government wants to tell all of us who paid into it for years that we’re like anyone else looking for a government handout, and we’d better be prepared to do without? I don’t think so.What if Social Security were a private retirement fund or pension fund? Let’s say the fund manager took all of the money and spent it on other things so that when the people who had paid into it and were dependent on it were ready to collect their benefits, the fund manager said, “Sorry, we spent the money on something else, and we don’t have any to pay you.” What do you suppose would happen to that fund manager?My guess is that he or she would be called a criminal and sent to jail. But we call this fund manager the federal government, and the people who run it want to act like it’s their call whether we’re paid benefits from a system we’ve paid into all our lives.It sounds to me like we need a new fund manager.

Robert DeWitt is senior writer for The Tuscaloosa News. Readers can email him at robert.dewitt@tuscaloosanews.com.

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